One Net Marketing’s client Uptake Gets Acquired by Groupon

One Net Marketing’s client Uptake Gets Acquired by Groupon

Nicole Sorochan

One Net Marketing’s client Uptake, the world’s third largest travel site, announced some awesome news this week: they got acquired by Groupon!

The deal was reported yesterday in TechCrunch. And today, the news hit media like the Toronto Star, the Financial Post, Search Engine Land,TechVibes, and Econsultancy. The disclosed amount was 20 million.

The deal involves an “acqhire” with the Uptake team moving down into Groupon’s Palo Alto office.

Uptake uses personalized social data to help users research their trips. And it’s this deep focus on aggregating content created by users relevant to you—not just content from hotels, travel sites, or random reviews—that has made it shine in the travel space. Yen Lee, the CEO of Uptake (also Canadian) and the rest of the Uptake team have been onto something big for years: hyper-local social travel advice.

Uptake has been one of the clients we couldn’t wait to collaborate with, especially in person. The team is so passionate about what they do, have always been iterative in their development approach and the team has worked incredibly hard. Walking into their office One Net always felt like a part of family – almost instantly. Yen Lee is an inspiration to our agency; he knows how to lead a team, has a clear vision of what he wants and also empowers his employees and contractors to explore new ideas. And… he is Canadian (Vancouver) to boot eh! We are extremely proud of Yen and the rest of the team – hard work really does pay off!

One Net Marketing designed Uptake’s previous homepage, developed a social media strategy for them, and worked on internal social media integration ideation.

Already millions of people enjoy Uptake (in terms of traffic Uptake is just behind TripAdvisor and Yahoo Travel) and now, they will be helping Groupon move further into a super social travel space.

“It’s great to be out of the SEO cloud,” Uptake’s CEO Yen Lee told us today. “Our strategic initiative into the social space, tapping into the crowd wisdom of travellers, is a great extension on our original vision and foundation.”

A major congratulations to the Uptake team! We can’t wait to see what Groupon and Uptake have for planned for travelers in the near future.

More about Uptake—making travel advice social

Deep social integration is what drives Uptake. While most travel review sites offer user generated reviews and tips, Uptake’s focus is on more relevant and personalized advice.

This sounds simple, but the technology is complex and involves Uptake’s patent-pending ‘destination mining’ technology. This technology allows the site to analyze a ton of user content from location data (such as hometowns and check-ins), implicit location data, photos, status updates, and comments.

The result? You don’t need to scan through mountains of user reviews. Instead, you’ll get some relevant advice about a new destination from the people you care about.

One Net Marketing’s client Uptake Gets Acquired by Groupon

Uptake uses personalized social data to help users research their trips. And it’s this deep focus on aggregating content created by users relevant to you—not just content from hotels, travel sites, or random reviews—that has made it shine in the travel space. Yen Lee, the CEO of Uptake (also Canadian) and the rest of the Uptake team have been onto something big for years: hyper-local social travel advice.